


Betrayal Takes Two

by HarveyWallbanger



Series: The Bloody Chamber And Other Stories [3]
Category: Constantine (TV), Hellblazer, Hellblazer & Related Fandoms
Genre: Canon - Comics, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 07:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2997047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You get what you pay for.  And, in one way or another, you pay for what you get.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Betrayal Takes Two

**Author's Note:**

> Look- it's a series! The title of which is also that of a collection of short stories by Angela Carter, because I am just that pretentious and full of myself. The title of this story comes from the song of the same name, by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. I am not involved with the production of anything, ever, nor is this school. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

Las Vegas wasn't what she'd hoped for. After such a build-up- her first visit!- Zed couldn't help but be disappointed. Sure, they'd solved the case- or whatever they were calling them- 'case' made it sound like they were detectives or social workers or something. Something real.  
The place made her melancholy- as she dressed the next morning, she mused that it must be the slot machines everywhere. Their ubiquity took the fun out of it. You could buy frozen dinners and diapers and then gamble away your life- or win a new one. Taking into account the math involved, all you had to do to win was wait long enough. That it might be impossible to wait long enough added nothing to the mystique. There was still no luck involved; just patience- impossible patience was still patience. Take away the concept of luck, that part of the magic, and the entire enchantment crumbled. How very little it had been built upon.  
Ten feet from where she and John sit at breakfast, the lights and sirens go off, and someone shouts: Hot damn! John make a disgusted sound, pushes his sunglasses further up his nose.  
“So, where's Chas?” Zed asks, moving her mimosa away from John, so he won't have to smell it.  
“He said he was going to get up early, go on a tour of Red Rock Canyon.”  
“That sounds nice.”  
John snorts. He's looking at something in the distance, frowning with, Zed imagines, the effort of just remaining vertical, when his face falls into the flat repose of someone in a trance.  
There's a row of TV's over the bar, showing early morning television. John motions to the waiter.  
“Yes, sir.”  
“Can you change the station, please? On the telly?”  
The waiter looks behind him. Zed looks at the TV; it shows some politician, handsome with bland cruelty, with dark hair and eyes. She looks at John, then back at the TV; a name appears beneath the man's face, 'S.W. Manor'.  
“It sounds like the name of a house in a historical district,” Zed muses, “Someplace where they charge you way too much to lead you around in circles and look at decrepit old marble and wood.”  
Is it her imagination, or does John whisper, “Not too far from the truth”?

After breakfast- which Zed eats and John orders but just glares at with open contempt- John goes back up to his room to sleep it off. Zed takes the walk to where Chas is staying. He isn't back yet, so she leaves, goes for another walk, up and down the Strip. It's a beautiful autumn morning- the sky is a heavenly shade of blue; the sun is shining full and strong; the breeze is exhilaratingly cool- and it makes her feel-  
Like a real person. Every movie she's ever seen and every book she's ever read tell her that you're not supposed to want this, not supposed to turn your back on destiny, but she thinks, if she could, she'd give it all up: everything she can do, everything she knows, for forty or fifty more years of days like this. Sweet, uncomplicated days to spend doing whatever she wants. Maybe doing absolutely nothing. No more nightmares, waking or sleeping. No more hands cramping in terror but unable to stop drawing. No more toil. No more obligation. No more destiny. No more John Constantine. She makes a face. He's not so bad. He just makes himself out to be less a person than some kind of mystery- and he seems to like it that way. On a basic level, how do you talk to someone like that? Though, she's sure, that's how she must seem to him. She could hardly present herself any other way, though. He's not ready for the truth. It's her truth, and she's not ready for it.  
She walks back to Chas' hotel. He's still not there, so she sits in the lobby, reading a free entertainment guide until she sees him walk in.  
“Hey,” he says, “Is everything all right?”  
“Yeah,” Zed waves her hand, “John's just feeling a little under the weather.”  
“Hang-over?”  
“Oh, yeah. It makes him cranky.”  
“What doesn't?”  
“So, I was hoping that we could have lunch- or dinner, later on. Whatever you want. He might be down for the count for a while.”  
“That'd be nice,” he looks at his watch, “Can you meet me back here in an hour?”  
“An hour,” she says and smiles, “Sure.”  
She walks back out, onto the Strip. She has nowhere in mind to go, so she just follows the sidewalk. There's something so calming about moving with the flow of pedestrian traffic. It's like disappearing, becoming one of a thousand specks of humanity, no one all that different from the others. She could run.  
She could run again, disappear not just in her own mind for a few minutes, but completely, forever. Never surface again, from the sea of anonymous humanity. Her life would be nothing but scenes like this, pieced together in only the loosest way. It would just be a matter of living out her days, letting the life in her run like a river, until it ran dry.  
It's time to be getting back.  
It's still too early for lunch, so they go for coffee.  
“I wanted to ask you a question,” she says. Suddenly, she finds it hard to look into Chas' eyes. This feels like some sort of bizarre infidelity.  
“Okay.” Chas is smiling, but his expression isn't without skepticism.  
“This is kind of silly, but,” she furrows her brow, “do you know any reason why John would have anything against S.W. Manor?”  
“He's some kind of politician, isn't he?”  
You know who he is, she thinks, peevishly, but she can't say it that way. Or say it at all. “Yeah. From New York.”  
Chas regards her, sighs. There's the effect of a curtain lifting or falling, light flooding in on darkness. 'Rude awakening', Zed thinks, suddenly, but she doesn't know why. Chas says: “I'm not going to lie to you. One, I think you'd know, and two, I think you've already figured something out. The truth is, though,” he shrugs, “I don't really know that much.”  
“What do you know?”  
“This was about ten years ago...”

This was about ten years ago. John had been here- 'here', meaning in New York- for a few years.  
(“Was he still living with you, in your mother's house?”)  
Yeah. He called it 'the Wicked Witch of the West's boudoir'.  
(“That's not nice.”)  
Neither was the house. After my mother died, we cleaned it up as best we could, but after all those years- he told you about the monkey... right?  
(“Yeah.”)  
After all those years of a monkey living there- not to mention my mother's impressive collection of periodicals spanning the decades, and the neighborhood cats who used to get in through the broken windows... It wasn't really the kind of place where you'd want to spend a lot of time. I know he wanted out of there. Punk rock is punk rock, but you can only have so much of a taste for degradation and misery. I had a job, I was already driving the cab, but I was just starting out, and you don't get good fares right away- What I brought in only covered basic necessities.  
(“How was John making money?”)  
You always seem to know the right questions to ask.  
(“Benefit of being psychic.”)  
You should have been a journalist. I don't know exactly what he was in involved in- Antiquities, he said.  
(“Somehow, I can't really picture him standing behind the counter in an antique shop.”)  
It was something to do with importation; according to him, it was more like he was a middle-man. Things would come into the country-  
(“Things would come into the country? From where?”)  
I don't know. John was, as you might imagine, sort of vague about everything.  
(“You didn't ask?”)  
Would you?  
(“Yes.”)  
Listen, we were just kids. If John was involved in something illegal, I didn't want to know anything about it. He was my friend, and I owed him, but I wasn't going to jail for him.  
(“You've died for him, though.”)  
I'm not a twenty-year-old anymore. Things change. Back then, though, I didn't want to get involved. My mother had just died, under very strange circumstances. I'd spent my teenage years being stalked by a chimpanzee in a Jayne Mansfield wig. If John was into something that could come back to get me, I just didn't want to know. I didn't want to know.  
(“You said that. But you must have figured something out...”)  
Of course I did. John's never been one for subtlety, and even less when he was young. He used to throw around some pretty heavy-handed hints. He had things coming in- from the East, he said. That went on for a while. Then, he started complaining about getting burned on deals, doing all of the work for no money- he said that he was going to start a sideline. He said that he knew enough to be able to make some pretty good forgeries-  
(“Forgeries?”)  
Not of paintings or documents, but of artifacts, occult artifacts; things that weren't supposed to exist. He talked about things that were said to have been lost centuries earlier, that in all likelihood had actually been destroyed, or locked away and completely forgotten. The genuine articles would never appear on the market, and no one would ever be the wiser. He said that he could make anyone believe that any cheap fake was a treasure; that what mattered was how much people wanted to believe. There were people who were desperate to believe. Rich people. The richer they were, the more desperate they were.  
(“Was one of these people S.W. Manor?”)  
There was someone named Stan. Stanley. He hated to be called that. By anyone but John.  
(“Did you meet him?”)  
No. I never met anyone from that world. I don't even know if it actually was Manor. The only one of his clients he ever mentioned by name was this Stan, from somewhere in upstate New York, who had money. Old money- like, Mayflower old. John said that his parents died when he was very young, and he grew up basically alone, raised by a butler. A lot of this could have been exaggeration, or out-right lies. It was definitely a good story.  
(“It wasn't a story.”)  
Because John Constantine would never tell a fib.  
(“No. I just know. So, what happened?”)  
Stan was a collector. He was just a little bit older than us, but he'd spent his whole life looking for, John said, 'exotica'. Supposedly, he had a massive collection, hidden deep in a part of his mansion that wasn't even supposed to exist. John said he owned objects of great beauty- works of art that had disappeared from the face of the earth- and objects of great power- and cursed objects, too. What he was really looking for, though, John said, was what money couldn't buy.  
(“So, what did John sell him?”)  
That, I don't know.  
(“But was it, like, the Holy Grail?”)  
To Stan, maybe. It was personal. All of this was personal.  
(“What happened?”)  
It's no big mystery. Stan found out that he'd been ripped off. John had to go back to England.  
(“But he came back. Why?”)  
You'd have to ask him that.

“Ask me what?” John's lost the sunglasses, and changed his shirt. He still looks like death. Just death in a clean shirt.  
“Why you didn't want to see the Canyon with me,” says Chas. Zed tries not to look grateful.  
“I don't like the outdoors.”  
“Natural beauty, fresh air- what's there not to like?” asks Zed, knowing that it sounds forced. She winces.  
“I don't breathe fresh air,” John says, “Birds fuck in it.”  
“That's great,” says Zed, “Do you want a cup of coffee?”  
“Tea, if you don't mind. With milk, and very sweet. Ta.”  
As soon as Zed's left the table, John sits down, and looks at Chas for a long time. Finally, he says flatly: “What did you tell her?”  
“I can't tell her what I don't know.”  
John replies, quietly, “No. No you can't.”

“Stan wants what money can't buy,” is all John says, finally. The other day, John mentioned him, Stanley, but when Chas asked who that was, John just laughed, continued laughing as he left the room. Whenever Chas brings him up, John seems to find it incredibly funny, though Chas can't imagine why. In Chas' experience, there's nothing funny about rich people.  
“What does that mean?”  
John laughs again. He's been laughing a lot, lately, sometimes to himself, when he thinks Chas isn't looking. Maybe it's drugs.  
Of course, it's drugs. What else do rich people and poor people both want? John still lives with him, but he spends more and more time away. Most weekends. Where he goes when he leaves, Chas doesn't know.  
Of course, Chas knows where John has been going. He's with Stanley. Who, after the hints that John's dropped, thinking he's being clever, even a dead man could tell is S.W. Manor, only son of Taylor and Martina Manor, deceased, heir to the Manor fortune. One of the jet set's most eligible bachelors, seen out with a different socialite or model every week. Of How-the-fuck-did-John-Constantine-meet-someone-like-that?, New York.  
But Chas doesn't ask. As much as Chas wants to know, he really doesn't want to know. A lifetime spent with his mother, and her moods, and her benders, and her séances, and Slut has honed his studied indifference to a fine point. It's why he's still alive, while his father and his brother aren't; he always knew it, but thinking it, acknowledging it, still shocks him. He has to sit down. He rests his head in his hands.  
No matter how hard he pushes it away, though, that one question won't leave him alone. It's taken on the dimensions of the Sphinx's riddle. Obviously, it's not actually drugs that Manor wants. If he did, he could get them anywhere; he doesn't need John for that. So, why does he need John? As he's always had, Chas has his suspicions, horrifying and tantalizing. Somehow, he feels sure that if he's able to figure out the answer, it will solve other mysteries, extant and perhaps not yet engendered.  
He never gets the chance to solve the riddle. One morning- well, it's still night, really- John comes home, awakens Chas with a shove, turns on the light, and tells him, “I have to leave town.”  
“Why?” Chas mumbles, pulling himself up to lean on his elbows.  
“Stan didn't like what I sold him.”  
“What? Is it drugs?” He knows it isn't, but what else can he say? He can't imagine how, but he knows that it's worse, the same way he knows all of the other things that he can barely admit to himself that he knows. “Are the police after you?”  
“No. It was never drugs. It was- something else. Nothing illegal. It's just inconvenient for me to be here, now.”  
Chas just looks at him. “I don't know anything,” is all he says.  
“No. No, you don't. But if you have any trouble, what's in here should get you out of it,” John presses a key into his hand. It's for a safe deposit box, the name of a bank printed on a label, tied to the key with a red ribbon. Chas frowns.  
“Consider your debt cleared,” John frowns, seems like he's going to say something else. A bit sadly, he smiles. “I'll send you a postcard from Merry Old.” Then, softly and quickly, John kisses him.  
Chas blinks. He doesn't have to look around to know that John has left. For the next five years, he'll wonder what became of him. Worry about him, like one does about a health condition that is chronic and untreatable but one can learn to live around. He'll read Manor's name in the papers, see pictures of his face, wonder what it was all worth, wonder what John did- or, more likely, what he came to know. He'll put the key away, someplace he only half remembers, has to think about in order to place it. When he and Rene begin to live together, he'll tell her about it, that if anything ever happens to him, she's to open the box. He feels like Bluebeard. Though, of course, with Bluebeard, it was the reverse. Isn't that the situation he's in, though, that of Bluebeard's bride: poised always before a locked door, a key in his hand, all of his wildest nightmares of degradation and atrocities pulsing behind a membrane of wood and metal? Time breathes, though, like a living creatures, and he finds that once time exhales sufficiently, he's able to take a step away from the door, and another, and another, until he's left that corridor of his life, altogether.  
But when John calls him, and Chas hears his voice for the first time in five years, he's slammed right back down onto that threshold, and the key is thrust into the lock, and Chas' hand is on the door's handle, turning, turning, turning.


End file.
